Shadow's Talent Read online

  Shadow’s Talent

  Book 1 of The Talent Show

  Published at Smashwords by Tommy Muncie

  Copyright 2014 Tommy Muncie

  Table of Contents

  Part One: Witness

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part Two: Victim

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  About the Author

  Connect with the Author

  Sequel to Shadow’s Talent

  Thanks to...

  Licence Statement

  Part One - Witness

  Chapter 1

  When I couldn’t sleep, I climbed.

  Tonight, the July air was so warm that I could do it in just my pyjamas and a pair of lightweight trainers. The harvest moon was so brilliantly bright that I barely needed the head-torch, but even I didn’t dare climb by moonlight alone. Although I thought about it, just for a few seconds.

  The spiralling branches of the oriental planes were my glorified climbing frame - my grown up version of the bars at school I once played space explorers with Ebony and Todd. Now it was about getting as close to space as I could, one year from being old enough to apply for the craft pilot school I would never have a hope of getting into.

  Getting into the tree was always the toughest part. I jumped for the one branch I could just about reach, grabbed hold and swung my weight back and forth until I had enough momentum to help me pull myself up. From here on, I was a human squirrel. My lithe, acrobatic frame didn’t suggest much strength to anyone who looked at me, but years of climbing all over my family’s farm had made my muscles strong enough to haul my weight up these trees that were twice as tall as the farmhouse. Sometimes I fancied that I might be able to climb them in pitch darkness.

  Nobody at college or the climbing club believed I could really climb by moonlight. It didn’t matter. Ebony believed me. She was the one who first dared me to do it.

  ‘Every time we go to the climbing wall, you have to go and be a boy,’ she’d said, after one of my sessions where my showing off got too much even for her.

  ‘So do you,’ I told her.

  ‘You think you’re so brilliant,’ she said when we got home, ‘then climb one of the plane trees without ropes.’

  ‘You first,’ I said, and we did it together. When my parents had to rescue both of us from two thirds of the way up with a ladder, we had to promise never to do it again. Ebony grinned all the way through my father barely holding his temper.

  That night, she decided she wanted to be more than friends with me. Two weeks later, we broke our promise and reached the top, then got all the way down again. Nowadays, whenever she snuck from the guestroom into mine and then found me unable to sleep even after we’d enjoyed each other, she always said ‘Shadow, go climb.’

  I reached the halfway point before I looked down and the adrenaline punched my heart into action. My lungs, already heaving great breaths of night air in, emptied out completely, tightening the muscles around them. My legs shook and became little better than hollow sticks. I leaned against the great trunk to steady myself and looked upwards. The moonlight broke through the canopy, pinpricking white dots everywhere.

  Something made a brushing sound below me. I looked down again, my heart slowing and the strength in my legs ebbing back in.

  The black labs were plodding slowly through the longer grass, their wet eyes reflecting in the moonlight. Those eyes always seemed to beg me not to go any higher, to remind me that if I fell I would almost certainly die, and that was why they always followed me out here when I did this at night. If I fell they couldn’t exactly do much, but they could at least bark their throats out and give me a hope that someone might wake up and come running. The dogs being out here added to the buzz. One fox call, one sight of a badger running across the paddock, and the barking pursuit would wake my parents.

  What would they be more mad at? Me climbing or the guestroom door wide open, and the bed empty because Ebony was occupying mine?

  I wasn’t going to find out tonight. Asa and Indigo were perfectly silent. Tonight belonged to me. I scrambled to the next branch. From here on up, the thinner branches were so close together that I could scuttle from one to the next like a spider on its web.

  A scraping noise came through the night. I froze. A perfect freeze, the same one that always won me games of Grandma’s Footsteps at cub-scouts. Barely a rustle came from the surrounding leaves. The scraping came again. Metal. On rock. Or gravel.

  Who the hell was digging out here at night?

  Who the hell was out here at all?

  One of the dogs made a snuffling sound, then gave a muffled bark.

  ‘Shut up!’ I whispered, looking down at Asa and Indigo who now had their ears pricked up and bodies taught with alertness.

  Indigo barked.

  ‘Indigo!’ I said. His name was enough to make him look up at me. ‘Shhh!’

  I brushed a branch out of my line of sight and looked back at the farmhouse, holding a deep breath in and praying that I wouldn’t see a light on.

  All the windows were black.

  The scrape came again. The dogs both started a second time; a prelude to what was sure to be a full-on barking frenzy. I called their names again, louder this time. Holding my breath, I willed the silence to hold and tried to pinpoint where the scraping was coming from.

  The tracks by the tree line, about half a mile in the distance. But it couldn’t be. Why would anyone be digging out there? I scrambled to the far side of the tree and brushed some branches back, expecting to see lights and silhouettes with spades in their hands, but there was just darkness.

  Nobody was there, I told myself. It was probably noise carrying from further away.

  It stopped.

  An owl hooted somewhere. The stream that ran through the paddock below me trickled. Then something clanged.

  The gate. Three fields down. The one that wouldn’t clip in properly and was done up with bailer twice that the cows sometimes chewed through. That was all it was. I should have known as soon as I heard it.

  I poked my head through the canopy leaves. The brightness of the Milky Way was spread wide across the whole sky. It was enough to make me glad of insomnia, the whole sky a delightful light storm through my eyes, as if the universe were inside a bowl and I’d just dunked my whole head in it. I shook my mop-head of treacle coloured hair and imagined it was all the dark matter of space, with planets and moons stuck to the wispy ends that tickled around the bottom of my neck and covered my ears. My arms ached and my limbs felt heavy enough to have filled up with water, but it was worth it for this.

  If I couldn’t reach the stars then I owed it to myself to get as close to them as I could.

  On a cloudless night like this I could almost always spot The Colony. Its light pattern was always slightly larger than any star cluster, and brighter. As bright as Venus or Jupiter, but slightly larger. On most nights it was an easy beacon for anyone trying to map the sky. In a sky like this one, it was like trying to play ‘Where’s Waldo?’ with stars.

  I couldn’t find it tonight, and it was probably just as well. I ought to stop looking at it and dreaming that I could ever reach it. The top of this tree was as high as I’d ever reach.

  Time to climb back down and get back to Ebony. She’d be asleep by now, and I’d soon follow. I’d get back into bed, wrap my arms around her and hug her against me, because she always said how she liked my breath on the back of her neck and the rise and fall of my chest against her back. I’d put my nose in her black h
air and sniff a deep scent of forest moss and earth, and the strawberry shower gel she always tried to wash it away with. That would send me off.

  The light stopped me. The tree line by the track two fields away lit up, the shadows rolling over the ash foliage. Tyres on gravel followed.

  I dropped three branches down back into the foliage and shifted a few steps sideways, finding a gap in the leaves to look through. It was a four-track, but not the kind that ever belonged on a farm. The chunks of added body kit brought it almost low enough to scrape on the track.

  My eyes readjusted and made out the shape of a second car, already at the far end of the track, concealed perfectly until the approaching headlights slowly illuminated the whole of it. A long saloon car, a BMW shape. Black as the darkness that had hidden it. The driver of the four-track pulled to a stop and switched to dipped headlights. Two people got out. The two in the BMW joined them.

  The passenger from the BMW took a quick glance behind him. I pushed a branch away slightly, to see further down the track. Something at the side of it looked the wrong shape. There shouldn’t have been a mound between the two ash trees, yet there it was.

  An earth mound. Earth dug from a hole.

  My stomach churned. My grip on the branches went weak. I slowly brought the branch back to re-obscure myself. These people couldn’t have dug that hole, I told myself. Not with just a few scrapes. That couldn’t create a mound like that.

  But nothing else besides a hole would have.

  My heart was already in overdrive, its rhythm throbbing inside my head. I had to move, except I couldn’t.

  Not what you think, I told myself. Not what you think. Just...they’re burying something. Someone. Nothing about to happen here, because it’s already happened.

  Slowly, I brushed the branch back.

  One of the dogs gave a low growl.

  ‘Asa!’ I whispered, hoping I got the right one.

  The four people by the tree line all looked up, then around them.

  Silence.

  Everyone walked around to the back of the BMW. The two from the other car were looking down at something in the boot. The BMW’s driver stood behind them, moving his arm behind his back, pulling something out.

  The limp he walked with sent a bolt of warning through me. A thought that even people who couldn’t run properly sometimes weren’t to be messed with, because they got that limp as a souvenir of a fight where they’d done worse to their opponent. Not the kind of fight they got into trouble for though. A legal fight. Cage fight. The kind people sometimes practiced for with any street fight they got the excuse for. Just like Brian Carson’s older brother, Matt.

  When he turned his face to the light, I knew it was him. Even without being close enough to see the brown of them that always made the iris indistinguishable from his pupils, the gimlet shape of his eyes told me they were his. The bent line of his jaw, from where he’d once cracked it, cast an ugly, jagged shadow on the back of the man he was standing behind.

  The blade Matt Carson swiped out from behind him flashed in the headlights. I shut my eyes as it dazzled them, but opened them to see the result of Matt’s lightening movement.

  I clasped my hand to my mouth as blood sprayed from the throat of the man who had been looking in the boot, showering against the open lid. As his partner wheeled around, Matt thrust the knife under the bottom of his ribcage and shoved upwards. Pulling it out, he was behind the falling victim in less than a second, clasping a hand over his mouth. A little too late to stifle the dying roar completely.

  The dogs began barking, loud and frenzied.

  I lost my footing as I panicked with them, and scrambled. My arms flailed, trying to re-grab the branches. The next time I had a clear thought, I was dangling with nowhere beneath me to swing to.

  An engine roared. Someone shouted. The driver’s accomplice pointed at the tree. Then the light flooded in – a main beam, illuminating the whole of the tree in brilliant white.

  Terrified, I swung and grabbed the branch in front of me, then the next one, then another, desperate to get out of the light and find a branch my feet could reach before my shoulders could ache too much, or the sweat on my palms could make my hands slip right off. I found it and landed, not sighing with relief but gasping ragged breaths.

  I could barely see a thing, my night vision now gone. Now I really was climbing blind, but in light.

  In light!

  Backwards. I had to go backwards. Just like I always...

  A bang split the night, then an echoing crack, then another, then another. Thudding sounds and the splintering of wood came all around me. Air rushed past my face so fast that I came off balance and almost fell face first downwards. The branch I stood on creaked and bent, the pull around my shoulders threatening to pull the joints right out of the sockets. Something splintered and went ratting down through the branches.

  Scrambling backwards before I realised I’d turned myself around, no longer able to think, just to trust to the instinct of over a hundred climbs.

  All the races up and down this tree with Ebony, and now I was racing for my life.

  My chest hurt so much from the storm going on inside it that I swore it would just explode before I could reach the bottom. I couldn’t get enough air in to scream for help, let alone groan with the effort all my muscles put into to keeping my balance as I grappled and slipped.

  The people in those cars were going to dig a new hole for me.

  Another bang, crack, and something slashed across me.

  I fell, the spindled branches whipping into my face, then my ribs, then my back as I somersaulted over.

  Complete weightlessness as I plunged downwards. The ground and the night sky blurred into one through the eye that could still see.

  The sound as I slammed into the ground didn’t come through my ears, it came though my bones. I tried to raise my head, desperate to breathe as though someone had wrapped my head in cling film, my eyes blurred and stinging with what could only be blood. The thud echoed through me over and over until it seemed I was falling asleep, and my thoughts were so scattered I had to be dreaming.

  Sleep wasn’t coming to me, but as I saw the widening circle of red soaking through my shirt, I knew unconsciousness was.

  ***

  Mum and Dad were going to find Ebony in my bed.

  There was no urgency in the first thought as I came around, just a dull pleasantness and resignation to the inevitable.

  The dogs barked and barked. One of them whimpered, close to me. I heard the panting in my ear first, then felt the wet nose against my face and slowly rolled over onto my back. Alive, but in heavy, aching pain as thoughts of Ebony returned to me and I smiled, then laughed, and my chest stung with what had to be broken ribs. I raised my arms and waved them above me, then tensed my legs. The base of my spine roared at me. It didn’t matter, it all registered with masses of delay, and I laughed.

  Indigo licked my face and I reached an arm up to wrap around his neck. I tried to use him to pull myself up but he backed out of my grip and then came back to me and barked twice. As I finally got to my feet, something stretched and pulled on my chest. Someone might as well have been grabbing a handful of my skin and gouging it with long fingernails. I clutched at the pain and my hand filled with blood-soaked cloth.

  Lights came on at the house. The door banged. Ebony came running.

  ‘Shadow? What the hell have you done?’

  I staggered for the back door; straining under the heaviness of what was probably a cracked hip that wouldn’t walk for me like it should. The pain didn’t matter. A smile creased across my face even though I was sucking every breath in through my teeth.

  ‘Shadow just stop!’ She grabbed my shoulders. ‘Just sit down right here and I’ll go call an ambulance, you understand me?’ She took hold of my claw-tight hand and took it away from my shirt. ‘Oh Jesus Christ.’ She put a shaking hand to my mouth. ‘Are you breathing up blood?’

  ‘I’m alright. Th
ey missed me.’

  ‘Who missed you?’

  ‘Police.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Get the police. Not an ambulance.’

  ‘Shadow, what just happened here?’

  ‘I climbed,’ I said. ‘I saw them, then I saw them kill someone and I fell.’

  ‘Who killed someone?’

  ‘Matt Carson.’

  Now she looked as stricken as I probably did. ‘Matt Carson’s out there? In the back lanes?’

  ‘Now are you going to call the police?’ I said.

  An engine roared somewhere behind the trees, in the distance. Rays of light shone between the trees, rolling their shadows across the grass. A figure stepped out from between the trees, gun in hand and pointed right at me.

  ‘GET DOWN!’ Someone shouted.

  I wouldn’t have done it if Ebony hadn’t thrown me to the floor, slamming against my hip and stomach and emptying all the air out of me. A shot burst through the night. Blood burst from out the back of the figure by the trees, spattering onto the trunks. Thrown backwards by the impact, he landed between them.

  My father ran down into the paddock, the barrel of a rifle pouring a smoke trail out behind him. ‘What the fuck’s going on out here?’

  The dogs started up barking again.

  Or maybe they’d never stopped. Everything echoed through me, the paddock almost melting away one moment then coming back into shape the next. I rolled over, heaving deep breaths in, fighting the pain to get every one of them in. He’d got me. The man by the trees had got me. He had to have....

  Ebony was all over me, her hands up my shirt, not the way I always liked in bed but cold, hard and fast, feeling every inch of me. Any minute now she was going to poke her fingers right in the exit wound which was sure to have ripped half my back out.

  ‘It’s alright,’ Ebony said, wiping blood away and putting pressure on the wound. ‘You’re alright. He didn’t get you. Who the fuck is he?’

  I had no idea, and I couldn’t have told her anyway.

  Had my father killed him? I tried to sit up, but Ebony’s weight was too much. Ebony, who could match me strength for strength when doing push ups or climbing, was going to crush me instead of saving me.